Music Is Rotted One Note is the third studio album by English electronic musicianSquarepusher, released on 12 October 1998 by Warp. The album is a departure for Squarepusher, with only elements of the familiar drum and bass style appearing in a largely jazz fusion production.
Background
The production of Music Is Rotted One Note did not involve any sequencing or sampling equipment, which had featured heavily on Squarepusher's previous work.[4] Many of the tracks instead have a "live" feel, featuring virtuoso playing by Squarepusher on the drums and bass guitar. His own comments on the album include:
One of the reasons that I headed in that direction as opposed to the more computer sequence-type stuff is because I was actually beginning to feel really limited using sequencers and samplers... I was really beginning to yearn for the sort of unpredictability of the randomness of improvising with live instruments. I was just starting to choke. The sequencer is too square, too digital. I just wanted to get really fucking loose and just start again somehow.[5]
There were also other principles at play at this time relating to harmonic content. One was that I was to abandon the overt usage of melody. This was because I had come to see it as a cheap way of getting people to like my music. It disgusted me that it was so easy to appeal to people and I thus introduced arbitrary rules to make it harder.[4]
